Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Meanwhile, diary after diary (and newspaper article after newspaper article) recounts the labyrinthine, nonsensical process people who actually use the program are forced to wend their way through, and even then, they're not getting the medicines they need.

Here's the message for Democrats:

This is what you get when you elect people who want to drown your government in a bathtub: officials who can't make a big government program work. Think Republicans could get you to the moon? Ha! Think again. Think they could have designed Social Security in the first place? Fat chance. Think they can manage the world's biggest military in an efficient manner? Not according to today's New York Times article, which tells us:

The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft copy of the document dated.
...
Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding. "It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies," said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. "You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process."

Inefficiency. Corruption. Fiefdoms. Iraq, awash in blood and misery and hundreds and hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, a lot of it missing and unaccounted for. Don't forget, we had this report yesterday too:

Pentagon Dismissed Tips on Wasteful Spending, Documents Show

By Seth Borenstein
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - A retired Army Reserve officer complained to the Pentagon's fraud hot line last year that the Defense Department had overpaid for kitchen appliances, paying $1,000 for popcorn makers and toasters and $5,500 for a deep-fat fryer that cost other government agencies $1,919.

Although he provided a four-page spreadsheet showing 135 cases of higher prices, the Defense Department dismissed his tip without checking with him.

"We've got an agency that is not doing its job of being a watchdog for the taxpayers," said U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C.

Documents acquired by Knight Ridder under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the retired officer, Paul Fellencer Sr., tried to blow the whistle on as much as $200 million in what he called wasteful spending.

If you want the world's biggest military, if you want Social Security and Medicare to work in a way that hard-working people who've paid into it all their lives deserve, hand the keys back to the Democrats, please. These people in charge couldn't run a high school pep rally, and it's time to take the country back and give it to the party that knows how to make things happen, like getting to the moon, founding the Peace Corps, creating the GI Bill.

And anytime someone wants to hang crap like the current Medicare program around our party's neck - even one little itsy bitsy piece of it - quote them this, from the Washington Post story above:

The change in the Medicare provision underscores a practice that growing numbers of lawmakers from both parties want addressed. More than ever, Republican congressional lawmakers and leaders are making vital decisions, involving far-reaching policies and billions of dollars, without the public -- or even congressional Democrats -- present.

"It happens in the dead of night when lobbyists get a [Republican lawmaker] in the corner and say, 'We've got to have this,' " said Rep. Fortney "Pete" Stark (Calif.), the Democrats' point man on Medicare issues. "It's a pattern that just goes on and on, and at some point the public's going to rise up."

Let's hope the public's going to rise up. I know I'm not holding my breath just yet. We need to hammer this home: One-party states are not conducive to democracy in the first place, but when it's one of the most corrupt and incompetent parties in our nation's history, it's even more of an inexcusable disgrace. Medicare. Iraq. Katrina. The triple crown of shameful incompetence, brought to you by ... the Republican Party.